Helpful Resources

Pages

Meta

Yes, you can convert your 8mm film to DVD. The important thing is to understand what’s available, how much it cost and what kind of quality you are going to get compared to companies that professional transfer 8mm film to DVD.

Option #1. Transfer your 8mm film to DVD yourself with your projector and a camcorder. The first thing to consider is that your old movie film was recorded at 16 or 18 frames per second (fps). Camcorders in North American record at 29.97 fps. So, you can see that your camcorder will be capturing some film frames more than once and sometimes will capture the film just as it is switching to the next frame. This difference in frame rates causing a flickering affect. Meaning, as you watch the video, you’ll see this pulsating light. This is caused by the film and camcorder running at different frame rates. In order to mitigate this, you might try running your projector at 20fps. This frame rate is more in sync with your camcorder and may eliminate some or all of the flickering.

Option #2. Transfer your 8mm film to DVD by getting a Elmo Transvideo telecine projector or a Goko telcine projector. You might be able to find one on Ebay for around $1000 to 1500. Run the film and take the output in to a DVD recorder. This eliminates most if not all of the flicker issue.

Option #3. Find the best 8mm film to DVD transfer company to do it for you. There are a number of companies doing film transfers. Learn about the basics and the different types of 8mm film transfers.

Several things have changed in the past 10 years. Media (Video Tape, DVD, Blu-Ray) and film transfer technology (Frame by Frame, Film Scanners) have gotten much better. In addition, the ability to view the footage on a high resolution (HDTV) has gotten much better as well.

VHS has 240 lines of resolution, DVD 480 and Blu-Ray 1080 lines. Film transfer machines when from 240 lines to 480 to 1080. TVs have gone from around 300 lines to 500 and now at 1080.

Film transfer to VHS 10 years ago would have been a 240 lines process, put on a 240 line VHS tape and watched on a 300 lines TV.

Today, we can do a film transfer at 1080 lines, to a format like Blu-Ray which is 1080 lines which would be viewed on a 1080 lines HDTV.

A high definition film transfer today can look about 75% better than a film transfer to VHS did 10 years ago.

So, to answer the question, yes, a film transfer today can look significantly better than a film transfer 10 years ago to VHS. See what our film transfer customers are saying.